Truphone outsources its interconnexions

Rating: Yes we do provide VoIP call tapping

By Tony Dennis

So off to the wilds of Tower Bridge to meet the infamous James Tagg of Truphone courtesy of the awfully nice Quiconnect. The purpose of the chat was to expound the benefits of Truphone signing up to an aggegator - Qiconnect - who takes care of all that nasty billing stuff when you try to roam onto a Wi-Fi network to make a VoIP call outside your home turf. As Mr Tagg pointed out, he’s got enough on his plate already without having to hire a team of 15-20 to sign Wi-Fi roaming agreements in the 50 different countries a typical Truphone user might visit.

With Quiconnect’s system you only have to sign in once and it takes care of the passwords and IDs you might need to input manually should you decide to try to roam yourself. Better still, you’ll only be charged per minute - against having to pay £5, for example, to make a single VoIP call while you’re waiting at the airport in Dublin. The pair haven’t decided how soon Quiconnect’s software will be built into the next version of the Truphone wizzard but a good guess is Q42007-Q12008.

The most interesting aspect of the conversation was when I asked Mr Tagg - given the new EU driven legislation that came into force recently - whether he has to let MI5 or MI6 listen into Truphone VoIP calls. The answer is yes, he does. So to ensure he conforms to the letter of the law, Tagg has hired a couple of ex-Royal Signals bods who know about these things. So in addition to keeping records of every Truphone call you make, the company now has to let the spooks listen in when they’ve got the appropriate writ. It’s not in real time but what’s an 8 second lag between friends?

Going back to the Qiconnect agreement, it’ll put Truphone users ahead of the pack because - besides being able to roam easily to make VoIP calls on their Nokia smartphones, it should also make it easy to send and receive emails and surf the Net using the handset’s browser.

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